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Sometime around 1570, Han Schnell, a Swiss Brethren lay minister,
published a pamphlet in which he summarized a view of church history
widely shared within the Anabaptist circles of his day. The Roman
emperor Constantine, he wrote:
was baptized by the pope Sylvester, the Antichrist, the son of
perdition, whose coming took place through the work of that same
loathsome devil. Therefore he received the name Christian falsely.
For the Christian church was at that time transformed into the
antichristian church. . . . When Constantine assumed and accepted
the name Christian . . . then the apostasy came, from which apostasy
may God protect us eternally. Amen.
Schnell’s deep conviction that Constantine’s alleged conversion to
Christianity in A.D. 312 marked the fall of the Christian church echoed a
view expressed repeatedly by earlier Anabaptist writers. In his Exposure
of the Babylonian Whore, for example, Pilgram Marpeck denounced
Constantine’s conversion as setting in place a fateful fusion between
ecclesial and temporal power marked by the introduction of infant
baptism, the substitution of Mass for the Lord’s Supper, and, most
troubling of all, a new readiness on the part of the church to resort to
coercion and lethal violence in matters of faith. And even though The
Hutterite Chronicle acknowledged that Constantine converted “with the
good intention of doing God a service,” it went on to describe the
consequences as a “pestilence of deceit” that “abolished the cross and
forged it into a sword.”
Although individual Anabaptists differed about the exact date of the
church’s apostasy—Menno Simons, for example, regarded it as
happening even before Constantine, whereas others dated it to the late
fourth-century reign of Theodosius, or even to the official sanctioning of
infant baptism by the ninth-century pope, Nicholas I—Free Church
theologians and historians since the Reformation have generally
regarded Constantine as a symbolic marker of a fundamental shift in the
history of Christian faith and practice. Constantine’s conversion set in
motion a process that would create the “Holy” Roman Empire, enlist the
civil authority of the state in the church’s prosecution of heresy, entrench
infant baptism as an orthodox practice (to be defended with the threat of
capital punishment), and transform the very character of Christian
catechesis and missions.
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Although debates over church-state relations continue to rage, few
contemporary Catholic or mainline Protestant scholars today would
openly advocate a return to the theocratic vision of Christendom often
associated with Constantine’s conversion. Thus, it bears notice—perhaps
especially so in the United States, where claims of divine favor on a
Christian nation have long served to sanction military interventions and
to defend an imperial mandate—when a prominent contemporary
theologian writes a book titled Defending Constantine that intends to
challenge head-on the assumption that Constantine’s conversion was
somehow problematic in the development of Christian history.
On the surface, Peter J. Leithart’s Defending Constantine: The Twilight of
an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (InterVarsity Press, 2010) is simply
a work of historical revisionism—a critical reassessment of the
historiography of the Roman emperor Constantine. Beyond that, as
Leithart himself acknowledges, the book also has a more “practical” aim:
“Far from representing a fall for the church,” he writes, “Constantine
provides in many respects a model for Christian political practice” (11).
But the primary target of Leithart’s avowedly polemic work is clearly
neither historical nor narrowly pragmatic. Instead, the book is intended
as a sustained critique of the pacifist theology and ethics of the
Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition, and especially the writings of the wellknown Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder, along with Stanley
Hauerwas “and their increasing tribe” of Anabaptist-oriented students
(11). According to Leithart, because Yoder “gets the fourth century
wrong in many particulars” it “distorts his entire reading of church
history, which is a hinge of his theological project.” By exposing the
presumed errors of Yoder’s understanding of Constantine, Leithart seeks
to undermine the entire edifice of his theological legacy.
Ordinarily, we at The Mennonite Quarterly Review have assumed that
the proper place to debate the merits of recent publications is in the Book
Review section of the journal. But because Leithart’s intentions in
Defending Constantine are so explicitly polemical, his arguments so
sweeping, and the critical reception of the book so positive in
mainstream evangelical circles, it seems appropriate for those in the Free
Church tradition to respond to his claims more broadly.
This issue of MQR is therefore devoted to an extended conversation
about the history of the Christian church in the fourth and fifth centuries,
with particular attention to the role of the emperor Constantine.
Although the primary point of departure for the essays is Leithart’s
Defending Constantine, the themes addressed here are wide-ranging,
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touching on history, theology, biblical interpretation, and, of course,
social ethics.
I am deeply grateful to the four scholars who stepped forward to
engage the conversation. John Nugent, a professor of Old Testament at
Great Lakes Christian College, challenges each of Leithart’s primary
criticisms of Yoder. He is especially clear that Yoder’s analysis of
Constantine’s role in the “fall” of the church was framed within a much
deeper narrative of biblical history in which God has always been calling
his people away from imperial identities to a life of vulnerability, trust,
and service to all those created in God’s image. Alan Kreider, a professor
of church history and missions at Associated Mennonite Biblical
Seminary, raises significant questions about Leithart’s interpretation of
several key historical sources. Along the way, Kreider provides a wealth
of evidence to support the argument that Constantine’s reign did indeed
signal a fundamental shift in the “gestalt” of Christian faith and practice,
particularly in catechesis, baptism, pacifism, and mission. He also
presses Leithart on the fundamental question—which Leithart virtually
ignores in the book—as to why Constantine delayed his own baptism
until shortly before his death. Craig Hovey and Alex Sider, assistant
professors of religion at Ashland University and Bluffton University
respectively, bring a somewhat narrower focus to their responses to
Leithart. Hovey’s primary question is whether there is a Christian ethic
for emperors different from that expected of ordinary Christians. Exactly
what instructions, he asks, should a ruler take from the Gospel about
how to rule? Sider probes the complex relationship of history and
theology, critically engaging both Yoder and Leithart on the question of
how theological commitments inform historical memory in addressing
questions related to the “fall” of the church.
It was clear from the very conception of this issue that we needed to
give Peter J. Leithart, Senior Fellow at New Saint Andrews College
(Moscow, Idaho), an opportunity to respond. Leithart’s rebuttal is
gracious but also tenacious: precisely because Christ is king, he insists,
kings should be Christians and exercise their earthly dominion in a
righteous manner.
Nothing in this issue of MQR is likely to resolve the debate in a
definitive way. But the exchange that unfolds here does push the
conversation forward. And in sharp contrast to the disputations with the
Anabaptists organized by state churches in the sixteenth century, it
models the manner in which deep disagreements among Christians can
be debated today in a spirit of Christian charity, without fear of torture,
imprisonment, or death by fire, drowning, or the executioner’s sword.
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One final comment: the last word in the conversation that unfolds in
this issue may actually come, fortuitously, in the form of a movie review
that appears as the opening contribution in the Book Review section. In
his reflections on the recent movie Of Gods and Men (Des hommes et des
dieux), Stephen Buckwalter summarizes the moving story of seven
Trappist monks, living in a monastery in Algeria, who found themselves
caught in the crossfire of violence between radical Islamist groups and
nationalist partisans in the early 1990s. In the face of threats, and then a
bloody massacre, most Europeans fled the region. For the monks who
had long worked among the villagers—bearing witness to Christ’s love
by sharing fully in their lives—finding an appropriate response to the
political crisis became a central question. Should they too leave? Should
they openly declare their allegiance with the nationalists? Or should they
simply continue in their long-established disciplines of prayer, offering
compassionate aid to all who asked and seeking to promote
understanding and reconciliation wherever possible?
Here we return to the ancient question, focused anew in Defending
Constantine, as to whether the Christian community is obliged to provide
a political narrative for those in power—a narrative that will justify the
righteousness of one side of a conflict and that, presumably, will
“redeem” the inevitable violence that follows by blessing it with the
sanctity of God’s name. As Christian history has shown, responses to this
question are never simple, especially in the face of innocent suffering. In
the end, the monks of Notre-Dame de l’Atlas refuse to either flee or to
submit to the logic of redemptive violence. Instead, they opt to simply
continue living among the villagers, pursuing their practices of prayer
and compassion. That decision sealed their earthly fate. But the sacrifice
of their lives forces Christian viewers to assess anew their own
convictions regarding the resurrection and the nature of true Christian
witness.
For Christians committed to the Gospel of peace, Of Gods and Men is
both inspiring and unsettling. It reminds us that Christian pacifism is
never passive; nor does it come with any claims regarding short-term
“effectiveness.” And for Anabaptist-Mennonite viewers in particular, the
movie is a powerful and humbling reminder that the same tradition that
produced Constantinianism, Christendom, and so much violence
directed against their forebearers, has also carried within itself a faithful
witness to an alternative understanding of the Gospel. For the gift of that
witness within the Catholic Church, those in the Free Church tradition
have good reason to be deeply and eternally grateful.
– John D. Roth, editor